Our Neanderthal cousins had the capacity to both hear and produce the speech sounds of modern humans, a study published in 2021 found. Based on a detailed analysis and digital reconstruction of the structure of the bones in their skulls, the study settled one aspect of a decades-long debate over the linguistic capabilities of Neanderthals. "This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career," said palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University back in 2021. "The results are solid and clearly show the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech. This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology."

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neanderthal family from a comic idea im working on!!!

An elderly neanderthal male is tracking prey along a well worn game trail.

Feeding a stranger.

Neanderthal woman and AMH baby :))

my beloved

Did You Know?

Neanderthals had glittery makeup!

Archaeologists have found evidence of ornamentation in Neanderthal sites that dates back 50,000 years--long before Homo sapiens got to the area. This ornamentation includes shells strung together and pigmentation, including bright colors and shimmery pigments made with crushed pyrite.

These prehistoric cosmetics suggest that Neanderthals displayed symbolic thinking, the ability to follow multi-step recipes, and the ability to mine ores.

Image ID: A shell, carefully broken in half with holes, that has been painted with an orange pigment.

Slowly working on this one, it's still an intimidating task (does that sound familiar to other artists? I dunno where to begin with this one lol, so I just slowly refine parts of the sketch and gather references) I'm still very excited about this idea and promised myself to finish it this year at least. So fingers crossed 🤞

nyanderthal au

snake used to make obsidian spear tips in his ex-clan. his arms were covered by small shards of obisidan, stucked under the skin.

Thinking about

how one of the most complete fossils we have of a Neanderthal female was discovered by three women (Dorothy Garrod, Jacquetta Hawkes, and Yusra; Yusra, a Palestinian field hand, was the first to touch Tabun 1).

how the site described as "the most convincing example of a Neanderthal deliberate burial" (La Chapelle-aux-Saints) was discovered by three Catholic priests (Amédée & Jean Bouyssonie, brothers, and Louis Bardon)

Ummmmmmmmmnmmmmmmm

As Homo sapiens migrated into Eurasia more than 70,000 years ago, much of the continent was already inhabited by Neanderthals, hominins who shared an ancestor with us but had spent roughly half a million years diverging. We don't know much about their ensuing relationship, but it was probably contentious at times. While Neanderthals eventually disappeared 40,000 years ago, there are now 8 billion of us. During their Late Pleistocene overlap in Eurasia, however, we know the two hominin species sometimes interbred, since many humans today still have traces of Neanderthal DNA. And according to a new study, this relationship goes back even farther than we thought, with a long-forgotten earlier chapter re-emerging from clues in the Neanderthal genome. When modern humans reached Eurasia in the Late Pleistocene, the study suggests, Neanderthals living there already carried traces of our species' DNA, apparently from a much older, previously unknown run-in with an even more ancient lineage of anatomically modern humans. That would mean some Homo sapiens ventured into Eurasia more than 250,000 years ago, the study's authors report, long before the continent's earliest evidence of modern humans. For context, the fossil record indicates our species evolved in Africa only 300,000 years ago.

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Here is a reworking of my neanderthal illustration. I was unhappy with some of the textures and hand of the original and decided to fix it.

It's them again